Remember kids, Tankies wants to undermine democracy - same as facists.

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89 points

These threads are odd to me, considering how many people call all communists tankies. The word seems to be used by anarchists, conservatives, communists, anti-communists, and more, and every person has a slightly different definition.

Half the people here could consider the other half to be the tankies everyone is mad at.

To be clear this isn’t me saying “be nice to the tankies” this is me saying “the overuse of this word is confusing the shit out of me.”

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42 points
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I’m an anarchist, we don’t call anybody tankies. Tankies is a term coming from the UK i think the 80s some eastern european nation was taken over by the USSR and some Brittish came out in support of it. So they were called tankies.

These political fighting words need to be layed to rest. Communists hate me as much as anybody else but I’d rather engage on the idea level instead of ad hominem attacks and name calling.

I suspect this whole tankie thing might be a coordinated propaganda campaign geared at discrediting communists and at the same time creating tension between them and other leftits. I suspect this as this whole infighting over small differences doesn’t lead to a victory for the left but effectively disables and neutralizes it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsqE9kEsDVY

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25 points

I’m an anarchist, we don’t call anybody tankies.

Speak for yourself… anarchists are very prone to using that term to describe the technocratic left. I know, I’m one of them.

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2 points

Hi nice to meet you, friend! 😃

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2 points
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41 points

It became confusing when liberals learnt of the word - now they hurl the word at anyone who dares to remind them that being pro-capitalist is still a right-wing thing to be.

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19 points
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Capital co-opting and perversing anticapitalist rhetoric to its own benefit, in my Lemmy? It’s more likely than you think.

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2 points

Anybody left that is not libertarian or social democrat from what I’ve seen tbh. And often weaponised.

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32 points

Maybe it’s just the circles I run in, but I understand “tankie” to mean leftists who think Soviet/Maoist/vanguard-party styles of Communist revolution/rule were good, actually, to the point of denying any bad things they did/do as “Western propaganda”.

Given the red scare in the US, our ability as a whole to use any sort of leftist political labels accurately across the population is basically non-existent, so I do understand the frustration by both tankies and non-tankie leftists about how the term gets used lately, especially in produce circles on social media.

But again maybe that’s just me. I don’t know if I would consider myself a communist, but I do consider myself as a yet undetermined variety of socialist, if that helps at all.

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21 points

…because none of those groups are Tankies and they are all unified against Tankies.

Tankies aren’t socialists or communists (not that those two things are the same either). They are the purist ideologues of communism, where compromise is defeat. Rampant in telling you why you’re wrong, and why only the purest form of communism will bring nirvana. All without understanding the consequences of what they propose.

Even the Communists don’t want them on their side.

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23 points

I think you kinda missed my point. Sure, socialists and communists don’t like tankies, but conservatives think the socialists and communists who don’t like tankies are tankies. They aren’t “unified against tankies”, they don’t agree who, what, and where “tankies” are.

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5 points
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Tankies aren’t socialists or communists (not that those two things are the same either). They are the purist ideologues of communism, where compromise is defeat.

They literally support a transitionary period and a capture of the bourgeois state for the interests of the proletariat instead of its immediate dissolution, compromise is the thing ultralefts criticize them for.

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9 points
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7 points
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Then there’s folks like me who have no idea what the term means, you’re not alone in your confusion.

Edit: thanks for all the replies folks! TIL

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9 points

Tankies are ‘communists’ ala Mao and Stalin, i.e. okay with the violent opression of democratic movements and minorities.

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4 points

At the end of the day, who gets to decide what the ideal “Worker’s Paradise” looks like? You? Me? Tankies are convinced that their vision is correct and will broker no compromise

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4 points
5 points

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=tsqE9kEsDVY

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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3 points
4 points

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/LcJ5NrJtQ8g?si=mOa-prQldsGdK7s4

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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7 points
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40 points
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Anyone who supports the idea of communism isn’t very intelligent to begin with.

Anyone who makes a wack generic statement like that can’t be particularly “intelligent” either

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0 points
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15 points

Anyone who supports the idea of communism isn’t very intelligent to begin with.

Good job projecting there… I award you ten out of ten PragerU coins for that one.

dislike Isreal people because thier allegiances lay the opposite to the United States.

Oh, it has nothing to do with the fact that Israel is a genocidal white supremacist settler-colonialist state?

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1 point

Hamas is not the palestinian people. Israel’s government is not the Israeli people.

You should not support Hamas or The Israeli government regardless of whi h side did what.

The comment you’re replying to was specific about the difference between the people and the organisations in control of their states so I think you should too.

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-1 points

Found the tankie.

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9 points
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Anyone who supports the idea of communism isn’t very intelligent

This isn’t fair. Anybody who can read through “das Kapital” must not only be very persistent and have endurance, no they also have to be fairly intelligent. I am surprised by the number of people who claim to have read “das Kapital” it has 4 VOLUMES ! 4 you can die if your bookshelf doesn’t hold and these 4 volumes fall on you.

Being a communist is just a function of your social class in society. If you are a laborer or poor you are naturally going to seek to pursue your interests for example you do not want to labor and have all the value you create go to the owners. You want to have a bigger share of the outcome of your labor. Communism is the consequence of this. Just like the royals and aristocrats and the captains of industry have the conservative ideology to further their interest so do the poor have communism. Neither conservatism nor communism make you smart or dumb. All it is is people pursuing their interest based on what position in society they hold. Both are ok. And none are dumb. It is inherently intelligent to pursue your own interest together with others who share that interest.

Edit: I am not getting into the support of any regimes or factions of wars as that is a can of worms i have no appetite for. 😅

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1 point
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8 points

I can’t tell if you are just angry and on a weird internet tantrum or a communist who made this account to do a bit

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2 points

Strong probability the name is a reference to catradora_stalinism, a prominent monarchist user on Hexbear. Not sure if it’s an alt or someone who really hates C_S.

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